by Nick Cave
‘Maybe I should report you to the authorities,’ says the man in the white tracksuit bottoms, who is suddenly standing next to the boy, talking out the side of his mouth and twisting the little polo player on his shirt. Bunny Junior swings away from the man because he thinks the man wants to eat him. He sees his mother get swallowed up by the crowd and, with a roaring in his ears, takes off after her, wishing his mother would stop disappearing all the time.
The boy notices that the people look like the undead or aliens or something as he weaves his way through the crowd. Everybody seems a foot taller and their arms have grown longer and their faces are mask-like and their jaws are slack. He looks this way and that and cannot see his mother and under his breath says that word again. He stops, looks up and down the promenade and stuffs a handful of chips in his mouth. He looks over the wrought-iron railing, down to the lower promenade, and sees, with a burst of love, his mother talking to a group of people who are sitting in an outdoor café. She is smoking a cigarette and Bunny Junior wonders when she started doing that. He thinks the first thing he’ll do when he is reunited with his mother is tell her to just put that cigarette out. He stuffs another handful of chips into his mouth and descends the stairs, two at a time, the paper cone held above his head like he was the Statue of Liberty or an Olympic torch-bearer.
It is hotter down on the lower promenade and hellishly bright. The boy wishes he had brought his shades because his eyes are itching like nobody’s business and everyone has got hardly any clothes on. The boy recoils at the mass of hairy arms and dead flaky skin and congealed make-up and stinky rings of sweat and cadaverous age spots and rolls of white fat as he winds his way through the crowd towards his pretty mother.
He walks up to the café, gasping for air and wondering what to do with his chips. Sensing the boy’s presence, his mother turns around.
‘Hello,’ she says, in a warm, familiar voice.
Bunny Junior can see that her features have been slightly modified.
‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she says and puffs on her cigarette.
There is something in the way she says this that makes the boy step forward and wrap his arms around his mother’s waist and rest his head against her stomach. He feels, at this moment, a vast sense of sad love for his mother, and at the same time wonders why she is not nearly as soft as he remembered her to be. Her stomach seems full of rocks and when he touches her breasts they feel small and hard.
‘Excuse me?’
The boy can hear something extrinsic in her voice – an unrecognisable and alien quiver of agitation maybe, or embarrassment, he isn’t sure, and it makes him want to let go of her, but he doesn’t know how to, so he clings on harder. The woman – whoever she is – squirms and pulls at him and little stabs of pain shoot up his arms as she manages to prise herself free.
‘Stop that,’ she says. ‘Where is your mother?’
The boy looks up at her and sees that she has a nose like a little brown hook and that her hair is not really blonde at all, but mouse-coloured, and her dress, which is actually pink, smells of cigarettes and old coconuts.
The woman reaches out to touch the boy on the head but he rears back and she accidentally knocks the cone of chips flying. The chips scatter across the floor of the restaurant.
‘Oh, dear, I am sorry,’ she says.
But the boy is spinning now, spinning and turning and running for his fucking life.
21
‘This Replenishing Hand Cream has almost magical restorative powers. The effects are instantaneous,’ says Bunny. ‘Allow me to show you.’
‘On these fossilised old things, I doubt it,’ says Mrs Brooks. She removes her rings and holds out her monstrous claws. Bunny squeezes some cream into his hands and reaches across the table and takes hold of the old lady’s fingers and gently massages the cream into her knotted knuckles. Her arthritic hands actually creak under Bunny’s touch. Mrs Brooks rocks back and forth, marking the space around her with her metronomic sway.
‘It’s been many years since someone has done this to me, Mr Munro. You have certainly charged an old girl’s batteries!’
Bunny says, in mock surprise, ‘My God, Mrs Brooks! Your hands look like a young girl’s!’
Mrs Brooks laughs a tinkling, happy laugh.
‘Oh, you silly man,’ she says.
Bunny Junior charges up the steps and along the promenade, doing his best not to touch the killer zombies, past the fish and chip man with his fuzzy blow-up arms and over the zebra crossing where the child-eaters operate, and when Bunny Junior sees the yellow, shit-splattered Punto he feels a palpable sense of relief, like he is back where he belongs. He pulls open the door and flops into the passenger seat, his feet doing their lunatic dance, his heart as heavy as an anvil or an anchor or a death. He presses down the lock on the door and rests his head on the window and screws up his eyes and remembers how his mum used to get pretty nutty some days – like the time he found her sniffing his dad’s shirts and throwing them around the bedroom or sitting on the kitchen floor crying with crazy lipstick smeared all over her face. But even though she had what his dad told him was a ‘medical condition’, she always smelled nice and she always felt soft.
There is a sudden rapping on the window as loud as gunshots. The boy’s blood turns to ice. His blood turns to ice and he covers his eyes with his hands and says, ‘Please don’t eat me.’
He hears the sound again and looks up to see a female police officer tapping on the glass.
The police officer is young, with cropped hair and a pretty face, and as she mimics winding down the window, she smiles at Bunny Junior and the boy notices, to his relief, attractive indentations appear at the corners of her mouth. He winds down the window. He sees she has an almost invisible frosting of soft blonde hair on her top lip, and when she leans in the window he hears the new leather of her utility belt creak. Bunny Junior smells something shockingly sweet as she says, ‘Are you all right, young man?’
The boy presses his lips together in the imitation of a smile and nods his head.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ she says, and Bunny Junior guesses the ogre in the white tracksuit has turned him in and he has no idea how to answer this question. He fiddles with his Darth Vader and shakes his head.
‘Why not?’ says the police officer, and Bunny Junior hears a little blurt of static come from her radio transmitter that sounds so much like a fart that he giggles for a second.
‘My dad says I don’t have to go to school today,’ he says, and suddenly he is sick to death of adults – police officers with truncheons and creeps in white tracksuits, zodiac-symbol-wearing wackos and women who crow like roosters, fat men in dresses and mothers who go and kill themselves, and he wonders, with fury, where his fucking father is. Almost immediately Bunny Junior feels bad for thinking that and erases it from his mind.
‘Why is that?’ says the police officer.
‘I’m sick,’ says Bunny Junior and sinks back in his seat and, with a dramatic flourish, approximates what he considers to be a reasonable imitation of a boy dying a million deaths.
‘I see. Well, shouldn’t you be in bed then?’
Bunny Junior shrugs and says, ‘I guess.’
The police officer points into the car and says, ‘Who’s that?’
The boy waggles his Darth Vader and says, ‘Darth Vader.’
The police officer stands up straight and claps her hand to her chest and says, in a mock-serious voice, ‘May the Force be with you.’
Bunny Junior notices the little indentations appear in the corners of her mouth. Then they disappear and she puts her head back in the window and says, ‘Where’s your dad, then?’
* * *
The silver bracelet that Bunny wears on his left wrist clinks, then echoes quietly around the room. Mrs Brook’s hands twitch in her lap and they do indeed look younger. She wears a blissed-out smile on her tiny, wrinkled face, and as Bunny licks the stub of his pencil and finis
hes filling in the order form, he feels, in a remote way, vindicated. He thinks he has outdone himself. He has sold this elderly lady a vast amount of beauty products that she will never use, but in doing so, he has made the old trout happy. But Bunny also feels a jittery discomfort in his body, a caffeinated restlessness to the order of his blood. He has felt this way all afternoon, and has assumed it was a basic quotidian hangover (he had overdone it a bit this morning), but through the window he can see a dark menace of starlings falling and ascending above the gusting sea and he understands, suddenly, that the discomfort he is feeling is actually a rising terror of sorts – but a terror of what?
‘You will receive the products within ten working days, Mrs Brooks,’ says Bunny.
‘It’s been an absolute pleasure, Mr Munro.’
It hits Bunny then and he realises he has known it was coming all along. He feels it moving up through his bones and he feels his heart adjust itself in preparation. He notices that the radio has inexplicably stopped transmitting and the room has darkened a fraction and the temperature has dropped. He experiences a lack of feeling in his fingertips and a lifting of the hair on the back of his neck. There is a brief crackling of the electrics in the overhead light. He knows more than he knows anything that if he raises his head and looks over at the living room wall, he will see his dead wife, Libby, sitting on the brocaded piano stool by the Bösendorfer. She will be wearing the nightdress that she wore on her wedding night and the night she hanged herself. He can see a smudge of orange in the far corner of his vision and an accusatory upward motion of an arm or something. He hears the starlings begin to twitter manically and peck and scratch at the window. The air begins to throb and warp, and when he hears great, heavy, doom-laden chords being hammered out on the piano, he throws his hands over his ears and makes an unsuccessful attempt to scream.
Mrs Brooks begins raking the air with her claws.
‘Beethoven!’ she shouts, deliriously, a curlicue of fog at her lips.
‘She had a medical condition,’ pleads Bunny.
‘What?’ says Mrs Brooks.
‘Eh?’ he says, keeping his head lowered.
Bunny feels an unsolicited and volcanic rage rip through his insides – a rage towards everything – this wife of his, who even beyond the grave hunts him down in order to wag a defamatory finger; this arthritic old bitch with her lacks and loopy needs; his spaced-out kid waiting in the car; his father dying of cancer; all the rapacious, blood-sucking women; the fucking bees and the starlings – What does everybody want from me?! He curses his own insatiable appetites, but even as he does so he tries, with a Herculean act of will, to divert his thoughts onto the shiny genitalia of a starlet or celebrity or anything, but can’t think of one because the starlings are dive-bombing against the window and the piano chords are so loud now he thinks his head is going to split in half. Mrs Brooks grabs his hand with her mangled claw and says, ‘We must love one another or die!’
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, keeping his eyes averted, keeping them down, keeping them closed.
He hears Mrs Brooks say, ‘It is just that you seem so sad.’
‘Eh? What? Sad?’ says Bunny and wrenches his arm away and slams shut his sample case. The old lady looks about blindly, her outstretched hand uselessly scraping the air.
‘Forgive me,’ she says, full of self-reproach. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have upset you.’ Her hands pound at the aggrieved space in front of her. ‘I’ll see you out,’ she says.
Bunny stands, head still inclined, his hands over his ears.
‘Don’t bother, Mrs Brooks,’ he snarls and reaches down and deftly and noiselessly scoops up the old lady’s wedding rings from the table and slips them into the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll make my own way,’ he says.
Bunny turns defiantly towards the Bösendorfer just in time to see the empty brocaded piano stool and the air wobble with his ghost-wife’s departure. He turns away, pats his pocket, flicks his pomaded forelock from his eyes and thinks – Fuck you all.
22
Outside Bunny stands on the footpath and allows the pale remnants of the afternoon sun and the gentle sea breeze to pass across his face and take with it the cloying atmospherics of the old lady’s dust-covered home – a place where ghosts appear. His shirt is soaked in sweat and he shivers as he looks around and notices that the starlings have gone. He still thinks he can hear the pounding, funereal piano chords coming from Mrs Brooks’ flat, but he can’t be sure.
He walks down to Marine Parade and as he turns the corner he becomes aware of several things at the same time. First, a female police officer is standing by the Punto talking into a radio transmitter or walkie-talkie or something. Second, she is wearing a blue gaberdine uniform that makes her tits hum with a custodial authority that hits Bunny right in the dick, and finally that she is definitely not a dyke because her arse is high-up and unbelievably fit. It is only as he strides towards her, the piano booming in his head, that he wonders what the fuck she is doing there.
‘Can I help you, officer?’ says Bunny.
The police officer stops talking into her radio transmitter and there is a squelch of static. Bunny clocks the weighty, hardcore accoutrements – handcuffs, truncheon, mace – hanging from her belt, and also her torpedo-like breasts and, despite his grim disposition, he experiences a kind of alchemical transmutation in his leopard-skin briefs where a mild-mannered mouse morphs into a super-powered hard-on from Krypton and he wonders, obscurely, if society would not be better served if they kept this particular officer away from the general public – like a desk job in a place where it was freezing cold all the time or something.
‘Is that your son?’ says the police officer.
‘Yes, it is,’ says Bunny, draping a practised hand over the front of his steepled trousers and clocking the number on her epaulette – PV388.
‘He tells me …’
‘You spoke to him?’ interrupts Bunny and looks in the window of the Punto and sees Bunny Junior slumped in the passenger seat looking decidedly out of sorts, his head lolled back, the tip of his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
‘He tells me he is feeling ill,’ says the police officer.
‘And?’ says Bunny. But he’s had enough of this.
The police officer says, all business, ‘What is your name, sir?’
‘My name is Bunny Munro,’ he says, leaning in and snuffling like a rabbit. ‘Is that Chanel?’
‘Excuse me?’ says the police officer.
Bunny leans in closer and sniffs again.
‘Your scent,’ he says. ‘Very nice.’
‘I will ask you to stand back, sir,’ says the police officer and her hands drop to her belt and hover around the can of mace snug in its little holster.
‘That must have knocked you back a few bob.’
The police officer repositions herself, planting her feet firmly on the ground. Bunny senses that she is new on the job and notices an activated, keyed-up gleam in her eye and a fleck of foam on her lower lip, as if this was the moment she had been waiting for all her professional life, and indeed, beyond.
‘Take a step back,’ she says.
‘I mean, how do you afford that on a policeman’s wage?’ says Bunny, thinking he may have got that thing about her not being a dyke wrong, and thinking he would probably be best served if he kept his mouth shut.
‘Would you like to continue this conversation down the station, sir?’ says the police officer, her hands dancing around her belt as if she can’t decide whether to mace him or club him.
Bunny steps forward, blood flushing at his throat.
‘The thing is, officer, that boy you just questioned in the car is frightened. He is scared out of his fucking wits. His mother just died in the most terrifying of circumstances. I can’t begin to describe the effect that this has had on him. It’s a fucking tragedy, if you must know. Right now, my son needs his father. So, if you don’t mind …’
Bunny notices the muscles relax in
the police officer’s thighs as she softens her stance. He notices a slight incline of the chin and a twinge of humanity around the edges of her eyes. Bunny thinks – No, he was right the first time, she is definitely not a dyke, and under another set of circumstances things might have panned out differently. He actually feels a throb of sadness as the police officer steps aside and permits Bunny to pass, open the door of the Punto, get in and drive away.
As he negotiates the late-afternoon traffic, Bunny pats Mrs Brooks’ wedding rings in his pocket, registers the after-scent of the police officer’s perfume and is almost blown out of the driver’s seat by a blizzard of imagined pussy, glittering and sleek and expensive and coming at him from every direction – Jordan’s, Kate Moss’s, Naomi Cambell’s, Kylie Minogue’s, Beyoncé’s and, of course, Avril Lavigne’s – but spinning up through all of that, in an annulus of tiny handcuffs and resting on a cartoon cloud of Chanel, comes the humble vagina of the police constable, number PV388.
Back on top – thinks Bunny, obscurely, as he turns into a Pizza Hut and hits the men’s room with a vengeance.
Bunny folds a slice of pizza in half and stuffs it into his mouth. Bunny Junior, shades on, does the same. There are so many jalapeños on the pizza that tears run down the side of Bunny Junior’s face and his nose streams.
‘She wanted to know why I wasn’t in school. I think it’s, like, illegal, or something,’ says the boy with a barb of irony his father does not detect.
‘And?’ he says.
‘I told her I was sick, Dad.’
‘And?’ says Bunny.
‘And she wanted to know where my mother was!’ shouts the boy and drops his piece of pizza, gulps down his Coke and rubs at his forehead. ‘And she wanted to know where my father was!’ Tears well in the boy’s eyes.
‘Bitch,’ says Bunny and stuffs another piece of pizza in his mouth.
‘Why aren’t I in school, Dad?!’ shouts Bunny Junior and wipes a great streak of snot from his nose with the back of his hand. Bunny looks at his son, flat-eyed, and rotates the bracelet on his wrist. He sucks his Coke and says nothing for a while.